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For those of us that love classic turn-based role-playing games, the PlayStation 3 is a barren wasteland (unless you want to play old PS2 and PS games on it). Into this empty hellscape comes Enchanted Arms, a by-the-numbers Japanese RPG that received a lukewarm reception on the Xbox 360 almost a year ago and has been little improved by the move to PS3. If you're a fan of JRPGs, then you'll know the kind of issues that you can expect from Enchanted Arms, because it suffers from the typical issues that plague these games: too many random encounters, crappy, nonsensical story and recycled enemies.

Like a Waterfall of Monster-flesh

The basic idea behind Enchanted Arms is that the humans of the world have crafted synthetic machines called Golems to handle mundane labor like selling pizza and doing heavy lifting. The technology to build these Golems has been lost to the people currently inhabiting the planet due to a big war in which giant Devil Golem war machines decimated everything, but quite a few smaller domestic Golems remain in wholly subservient roles. Of course, all this changes when your character, Atsuma (the archetypical brash young hero), cuts school to enjoy a street festival and ends up unleashing one of the old Devil Golems on the unsuspecting populace.

This catastrophic event dominoes into all of the Golems becoming evil and revolting against their human overlords. As the one personally responsible for this fiasco, it's up to you to fix things. While this may sound like a great premise in theory, in practice what you get is a never-ending deluge of small-time battles against the lowest common denominators of Golem society. Granted, Enchanted Arms has a few features to make things go by faster, but ultimately these just aren't enough to provide any sort of pacing besides an excruciating grind. The fast-forward button for combat speeds things up a little, but not enough that it makes a huge difference (and the major EX attacks your party can use still take very long to complete, even when fast-forwarded). Of course, you always have the option to let the game auto-battle for you, but at that point, you might as well just walk away and let the game play itself since fighting is the only time you really get to interact with anything.

It's an old complaint to say that there are too many random encounters in a JRPG, but that's all the more reason that it shouldn't be happening anymore. How long have these kinds of games been coming out? This type of tired mechanical repetition is a throwback, especially when so many other respectable JRPG titles feature advances that improve upon the concept without losing much of the flavor (I'll point to Final Fantasy XII, or any FF game really, as an ideal example). Still, Enchanted Arms persists in foisting an encounter on you every few yards, and it gets old really quickly.